


wicked and sad, mortal and bearable

by thingswithteeth



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: 1970s, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canonical Character Death, F/F, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-02
Updated: 2020-09-02
Packaged: 2021-03-06 16:49:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 19,649
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26252191
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thingswithteeth/pseuds/thingswithteeth
Summary: February, 1979: workers are striking across the country in the midst of the coldest winter in years, and Gertrude Robinson meets Agnes Montague for the first time. It changes nothing. It changes everything.
Relationships: Adelard Dekker & Gertrude Robinson, Agnes Montague/Gertrude Robinson
Comments: 10
Kudos: 29
Collections: Rusty Quill Big Bang 2020





	wicked and sad, mortal and bearable

> “That winter it seemed the city  
> was always burning.”
> 
> \- Mary Oliver, _The Fire_

The rat scrambles across the pavement a whisker-length away from the toe of Gertrude’s shoe, and at that distance only because she’s graciously stopped to let it pass between the trash piled shoulder high against the fence and that clogging the gutter. Daring creature. The Filth must be having a field day with the current crisis, although she’s yet to receive direct confirmation of that. Perhaps there have been no survivors. She _has_ taken statements from others who have had near misses in recent days: a factory worker from Speke who had almost convinced herself that she had never seen a chorus of the dead sit up and speak; a young man who had found himself nearly buried alive in a pile of rubbish, shedding old crisp packets and squashed cigarette butts as he walked through the Archives.

Gertrude has walked the same route from her flat to the Magnus Institute for the entirety of her fifteen year tenure as Archivist. She’s not about to stop now. Nor is she going to acknowledge the smell, although she is distantly grateful that the waste collectors hadn’t decided to strike during the height of summer.

A wall of noise hits her as she descends into the Archives. She refuses to call it music. It’s a shock to the system after the near silence of the Institute’s lobby, but one that she’s already braced herself for out of unfortunately long habit.

“Eric.”

_“You’ll be the last in his book of flesh so rare—.”_

_“Eric_.” This time she pitches it to carry, her voice punching through both the shout-singing of the vocalist and Eric’s off-key harmony. Her erstwhile assistant pokes his head out from between the stacks, looking distinctly caught out. She’s not sure if it’s the music or the cigarette gently smoldering between his lips that’s causing the look, and she doesn’t particularly care.

“Turn that down,” she says, and he hurries to comply. Her heels thump against the floor in a very satisfying way as she approaches; she can practically see his pulse rabbit in his neck in perfect time. She reaches up and plucks the cigarette from between his slack lips, ignoring his indignant squawk as she lifts it to her mouth and takes a long drag.

She exhales slowly, smoke pooling between them. “And put this out,” she says mildly, before grinding the cigarette with perhaps a little too much force into the soot-scarred ashtray he’s left on the table. “This is an _archive_ , for God’s sake. Do you want the whole place to go up in flames?”

He almost smiles, before he remembers that she isn’t joking. “No, Gertrude.”

Gertrude is almost smiling herself as she strides past him. She hasn’t completely forgotten how. Her hand is resting on the door to her office when Eric makes another borderline incoherent noise and says, “Sorry, I forgot, there’s someone waiting for—.”

There is a woman seated at Gertrude’s desk. She has Hepburn’s graceful neck and Sophia Loren’s eyes, tilted and heavy-lidded and far too knowing. Her hair is long and straight, an improbably bright auburn, the light glinting against it with the same glow as coals banked in a fireplace or the memory of a burning house. Even seated, Gertrude can tell that she’s tall.

For some reason, Gertrude had never imagined that she would be tall.

“Hello, Agnes,” Gertrude says, and lets the door swing shut behind her.

**

“They can’t know I’m here,” Agnes says. “You can never tell them.”

Gertrude feels her lips curl with even less humor than she had offered Eric. “You can’t think that I spend much time socializing with your _disciples_ , my dear,” she says. “Notice, please, how the skin has not been melted off my bones.”

She’s left Agnes the perfect opening for the kind of bluster and threats that her cult seems to so adore. She pauses politely to allow Agnes to tell her that skin melting is still very much on the proverbial menu, but Agnes says nothing, just sits there and tracks Gertrude’s progress around the desk with dark, watchful eyes. The silence is unexpected enough to be interesting, and perhaps that’s why Gertrude fills it a moment later by saying, “Tea?”

Agnes tilts her head, and she actually appears to be giving the question some careful deliberation. “Tea would be lovely,” she says, and there’s a strange lilt to her words, stilted as a schoolboy fumbling his way through some bit of memorized Shakespeare. “Thank you.”

“Lovely,” Gertrude repeats back blandly. The automatic kettle in her office is an indulgence, but not one she regrets; she permits herself very few indulgences, these days. She manages to sound very nearly conversational when she says, “Given our history, I’m surprised to find you here. Or surprised to find the building still standing upon my arrival. You’ve shown a great deal of restraint.”

“The only question you’ve asked me so far is whether I’d like some tea,” Agnes says, “so I’m not the only one showing restraint.” She smiles a little. Gertrude isn’t sure why.

“You make a fair point. Fine. Why are you _here_ , Agnes?”

Agnes’ smile disappears. “Perhaps I just wanted to finally meet you.”

“Flattering. You’ve had plenty of opportunities in the past decade.” Gertrude gestures vaguely at the office’s four walls. “I can’t imagine I’m very difficult to find.” And although they’ve never discussed it, Gertrude is certain they’re both aware of the myriad reasons why this meeting has been so long coming, and why it remains a bad idea even now. “Why are you _really_ here?”

For a long moment, Agnes just stares at her. Gertrude has grown very accustomed to receiving prompt answers when she’s the one asking the questions, but she supposes that she wouldn’t be very surprised to find that Agnes has some level of resistance; Gertrude has rarely had the opportunity to test her particular skills against someone of Agnes’ _caliber_ , and there is their connection to take into account. Gertrude has survived ten years with the Desolation’s heat licking at her veins and crackling in her lungs. It’s entirely possible that Agnes has spent the same ten years with the weight of the Watcher’s gaze on her skin. Perhaps Gertrude shouldn’t have been so quick to dismiss curiosity as a motivator.

“I need your help,” Agnes says eventually.

“I can’t imagine why you would think I’d be willing to offer it.”

“I’m not suggesting you give me something for nothing.”

The back of Gertrude’s throat tingles. It takes her a moment to realize that what she’s feeling is a laugh, bubbling up from her chest. Laughing in the face of an avatar of the Desolation is not wise, and while Gertrude has spent years diligently teaching herself not to be afraid, she’s also not a fool. “What is it you think you have that I might want?”

Agnes rises from her seat. She rounds the desk, and Gertrude has spent years teaching herself not to be afraid, so she doesn’t move from her chair, even when Agnes leans against the filing cabinet close enough that Gertrude can feel the heat rolling off of her. Her legs flash pale beneath the edge of her skirt and her eyes are huge and dark as she studies Gertrude, not looking away even when she reaches out to stroke her fingers against the side of the kettle.

The kettle begins to boil immediately.

“What all Archivists want,” Agnes says. “Knowledge.”

**

Linus Maxwell Blakeley is a thirty-four-year-old chartered accountant with nothing particular of note about him other than a predilection for setting fire to the tails of the neighborhood strays that had eventually graduated to setting fire to the neighborhood tramps. That had been enough to draw the attention of the Cult of the Lightless Flame. From what Gertrude can gather, he’s more of a hanger-on at this point, enthusiastic enough about the Cult’s penchant for pain and destruction but not exactly on the _level_ of the likes of Arthur Nolan or Diego Molina.

“He’s been acting odd,” Agnes says. “He’s been avoiding me. Avoiding us all, really.”

“Maybe he’s reconsidered the wisdom of offering you his devotion.”

“No,” Agnes says. “They never do, not once they’ve met me.”

It’s said simply, without arrogance, as though Agnes is simply relaying a fact about which she has no particular feelings. Gertrude is inclined to believe her.

“If that’s the case, you must be spoiled for choice when it comes to—admirers? Converts? Why does it matter to you if this one slips away? What’s so special about Linus Blakeley?”

Agnes shrugs. “Very little, but he's promising and he’s mine. Does it matter? I’ve told you what I need, and what I’m willing to trade.”

“Yes. Knowledge. I may need you to expand on that, my dear.”

The cup of tea cradled between Agnes’ hands hasn’t stopped steaming, even though they’ve been dancing around their negotiations for the better part of half an hour. She’s yet to so much as take a sip. “You’ve started to suspect,” she says, slow and considered, “that we’re not the only ones attempting to achieve something—greater.” Gertrude makes every attempt to marshal her expression, but something must bleed through, because Agnes’ small, pleased smile makes an encore appearance. “Word gets out. You’ve been sniffing around, trying to get the scent of some of the other rituals for helping a god to manifest in our world. You’ve figured out that there might _be_ other rituals. I can help you. I can tell you all about them, everything I know.”

“Or so you say. You’re asking me to take a great deal on faith.”

“I’m a god incarnate,” Agnes says. “Faith is the currency I deal in.”

“You’re not my god,” Gertrude says, but she accepts the scrap of paper that Agnes offers her. There’s the name of a hotel and a room number scrawled on it. The hotel is a much nicer one than Gertrude could afford on an archivist’s salary. Apparently, being a cult leader pays in currency other than the adoration of the masses, no matter what Agnes claims.

“You can’t tell them I came to you,” Agnes says before she leaves. “You can’t tell them.”

There’s a sharp retort on the tip of Gertrude’s tongue and nothing to be gained by making promises, so she surprises herself a little when she says, “I won’t.”

**

“I need you to comb the Archives for any mention of a Linus Blakely,” Gertrude says to Eric as she shrugs back into her coat.

“Sure. Any idea when he came in?”

“I don’t know that he would have been the one giving the statement,” Gertrude says. Given the nature of Linus' leisure activities, he’s certain to have given a few people nightmares; no telling if one of them had found their way to the Magnus Institute. “He’s just north of thirty, so you can probably rule out anything earlier than—oh, let’s say 1950 or so. Probably.”

Eric stares at her in a faintly accusatory manner. Gertrude stares back. Eric caves first. “You do know that the only way for me to do that is to go through the statements one by one, right? There’s no way for me to cross-reference a name. I don’t think the catalogue has been updated since—since you started here as Archivist.”

Not quite since the start. Gertrude had been quite diligent those first few years, when she had known that there were terrors waiting outside the walls of the Magnus Institute but hadn’t yet learned what was lurking within, still reeling from Angus’ death but secretly a little giddy at the thought of being the first woman to claim the title of Head Archivist. Were she still capable of feeling embarrassed by her past self, she would be. “In that case, you’d best get started.”

Eric opens his mouth, but subsides into scowling petulance without uttering a word. It’s for the best. There’s some chance that Linus Blakeley has made a statement, or had one made _about_ him, but she doesn’t think it altogether likely and even if Eric were to turn something up, it’s doubtful to have any bearing on the current situation. Looking will keep him occupied, however, and stop him from wondering why she’s spending so much time away from the Archives. He’s been wondering about that more and more recently, which is inconvenient.

“This would be easier if you didn’t always have Emma out chasing geese, and dragging Fiona with her.”

“The follow-up research that Emma does is essential.” Emma is an excellent assistant, and Fiona—well, undoubtedly the poor doddering dear could use the fresh air. “Of course, you’re welcome to return to the field if you’d like. I’m sure Emma would appreciate the help.”

Eric won’t quite meet her eyes. He’s never been much for field work, has always preferred to be in the Archives, listening to his music and trying to undo all of her hard work by bringing order to the statements, but he hasn’t left once since returning from his medical leave earlier this year. Gertrude is fairly certain that the migraines still trouble him, and she hasn’t pushed him, but mercy has not been her primary motivator. It’s simply more convenient to have Eric—content. Compliant.

“It’s fine,” Eric says. “Linus Blakeley. If he’s in here, I’ll find him.”

Gertrude doesn’t smile. “Good.”

**

Gertrude doesn’t really expect much from talking to the wife, but she gets even less.

“Linus?” Margaret Blakely blinks slow enough for the light to catch on the shimmering green shadow smeared across her eyelids. Her hair is perfectly coiffed in a manner which could probably survive an apocalypse. “I haven’t seen him since—oh, it must have been our church group meeting, last Thursday.” Her lips purse as she searches her memory, and eventually she offers a placid nod of confirmation, as though not seeing one’s husband for the better part of a week is a perfectly natural occurrence. Perhaps it is. Gertrude has never kept a husband herself; they require a great deal of tending and she lacks both the time and inclination.

“I see,” she says.

Some of her skepticism must leak through, because Margaret immediately says, “He works a great deal, my Linus.”

Work seems an unlikely lead, but the church group is more promising. Perhaps he only attends to please his wife, given as she knows that he now lays his devotion at a different altar entirely, but, “This church group. The two of you go together? Every week?”

Margaret appears to be attending to the conversation for the first time since Gertrude arrived on her doorstep; her listless eyes have finally focused on Gertrude’s face, and she looks almost eager. “Yes. Are you interested?”

“Perhaps.” She accepts the leaflet that Margaret offers her but doesn’t give it more than a cursory glance before shoving it in the pocket of her coat. If nothing else, Gertrude knows where Linus Blakeley will be in two days.

She makes her excuses and departs somewhat more quickly than is polite. She glances over her shoulder as she leaves, but the house is about what she had been expecting from Linus Blakeley the moment she had learned anything about him: construction so new that she wonders if her hand would come away wet were she to touch the paint, with a lawn as perfectly manicured as the woman she had left inside. The short concrete drive is equally pristine, save for a small smear of motor oil. She doesn’t see a car, but she doesn’t doubt that they own one. Linus also does not seem like the kind of man to rely on public transport, especially given his need to travel to and from neighborhoods that will better furnish him with his preferred kind of victim. He’s a coward, in his way. He’ll place burnt offerings at the feet of his god, but no one who he thinks will be missed, and no one who looks too much like himself. Idly, Gertrude wonders if he’ll eventually follow in the footsteps of some of the Cult’s other members by stowing away enough of his tidy little salary to buy a tenement or two somewhere, full of people too desperate to leave. It’s a popular move for them, one which had once filled Gertrude’s belly with an apt kind of fire, but that had been years ago. Caution has served her better than passion; it is the most valuable lesson Angus had ever taught her, albeit by example of what _not_ to do. She cannot tilt at every burning windmill. She’s learned not to want to. She’s learned to stock the windmill with dynamite first, if she truly intends to bring it down.

No car, and Margaret’s excuses for Linus’ absence do ring a little hollow. Whether Linus is at his place of employment during the daylight hours or elsewhere, Gertrude is interested to know if the driveway is quite so empty by night.

Perhaps she’ll have more luck after dark.

**

“Message for you,” Adeline chirps as Gertrude comes through the door. The phone receiver is wedged between her cheek and her shoulder and her finger is twirling the looped cord into even more complicated twists and whorls, but she appears unconcerned about whether the caller on the other end can hear her speaking to Gertrude. Not a great deal concerns Adeline. She had been Richard’s secretary for six years before James had taken up the mantle of Director, but she barely seems to have noticed the change. Gertrude wonders sometimes how much she knows about the Magnus Institute and the man who reigns over it, if she’s so blasé because the answer is nothing or because it’s _everything_. Her gaze is wide and blank and somewhat disconcerting when it rests against Gertrude’s skin.

Gertrude offers a curt thanks and accepts the slip of paper Adeline hands her. Emma’s name is scrawled across the top of the page, and Gertrude scans the message with minimal interest. Still following up on the Crowther statement, still with Fiona, chasing after some new lead on the supposed disappearance, a few characteristically cheerful complaints about the cold and the rain. Nothing of real interest, but it is good of Emma to check in. For just a moment Gertrude feels a pang of regret that the end of this particular mystery does not appear to be anywhere in sight, and that Emma is unlikely to stop chasing it before her curiosity has been at least somewhat satisfied. Emma is the only one of her assistants who knows of Agnes, and it would be—nice, to have her opinion.

Eric is crouched swearing over the mimeo when she descends into the Archives, his fingertips stained black with ink. He tries to wave her down; she ignores him. She doesn’t intend to stay for long. She barely intends to stop at all, and the faintly indignant glance Eric casts her way when she heads back the way she came barely ten minutes later makes his opinion on the matter _quite_ clear.

Three men are clustered at the door to the Institute, blocking Gertrude’s exit. She recognizes one of them, an assistant researcher who has stagnated in the reading room for the better part of five years because his ambition doesn’t match his ability and Diana, with her iron-fisted grasp on the Institute’s library, is far too sharp not to know it. The other two don’t look particularly familiar – Gertrude rarely bothers to learn the names of the new librarians and researchers – but that doesn’t mean she’s unaware of what’s happening here. _She’s_ far too sharp not to recognize bullying when she sees it.

The target is young, probably too young to be working here, but James has always been lax when it comes to his hiring practices. He’s round-faced and yellow-haired, and even from a dozen feet away she can see the flush of impotent frustration burning across his cheeks.

“Excuse me,” she says, ice in her voice. There had been a time when the young bucks in research would not have hastened to comply quite so quickly, a time when she was less respected – less feared – in the Institute’s halls, but she’s spent some time cultivating her reputation. They part like the Red Sea before her.

It’s a neat solution to her problem, so she’s uncertain why she takes a step forward and hesitates, something heavy sitting like a lump of lead in the pit of her stomach, where her ever-burning lungs turn it molten. Uncertainty gives way to resignation, and she flicks a glance at the culprits. “You’ll meet me in Mr. Wright’s office at nine sharp tomorrow morning. We’ll be discussing your continued employment.” The tension in her belly eases, and the impulse is nothing she can’t rationalize: it’s never a bad idea to remind them who she is. It’s never a bad idea to remind _James_ that he won’t deny her when she sets her mind to something, that he won’t risk offending not only the most useful tool in his chest but the most deadly weapon in his arsenal. Not for any particular reason, except that the reminder always irritates him and satisfies her in some small, petty way.

The two men she’s made the target of her ire are quick to scurry away, as most people who find themselves in her crosshairs do. She’s left standing alone in the Institute’s foyer with the young man whose rescue had been a byproduct of her desire to have today be one of the days in which she frustrates the smooth running of the organization of which she is a part.

“ _Thank you_ ,” he says, with a level of sincere feeling that makes her feel distinctly uncomfortable. “I—there’s a help line I volunteer with days off, and ever since they found out—.”

Gertrude doesn’t care, but she’s not stupid enough to fail to read between the lines and not unobservant enough to miss the tiny lambda pin mixed in among to others festooning the lapels of his jacket. She makes a noncommittal noise and goes to step past him.

“They’ll be back at it tomorrow, you know.”

She closes her eyes and begs powers she no longer believes in the existence of for patience. “They will no longer work here tomorrow, Mister—?”

“Shelley. Uh, Michael. You can call me Michael.” The rest of what she had said seems to catch up with him. “Wait, you’re _sacking_ them?”

“I prefer _made redundant._ ” It’s more accurate. Undoubtedly they have been redundant since birth, as aggressively mediocre young men with unearned success often are. One of the file clerks hired around the same time as Diana’s problem child of a researcher also comes to mind, although he at least is harmless as well as gormless. _Elias_. His name she remembers, mostly because Eric curses it so often. She doesn’t blame him. Elias frequently misplaces files and, while Gertrude is generally delighted by his unintentional assistance in leaving the Archives in disarray, Eric is too good at his job and too possessive of his domain not to be bothered.

“I—you can’t—.”

“I assure you, I can. Will that be all?”

She’s been brusque with him, so she’s a little surprised when she looks at him and finds him looking back with bright eyes and a face lit with something that looks very much like adoration. “Yes ma’am.”

She can feel those adoring eyes on her back all the way to the door, and she bites back a sigh.

Potentially inconvenient.

( _Potentially useful_ something within her whispers, in a voice which sounds very much like her own.)

**

The Blakeley residence is dark when she arrives. Margaret is either out for the night or fiendishly early to bed. The car is still absent from the drive. There is a man attempting to surreptitiously rifle through the household’s overflowing bins.

She sees the moment when he spots her approach. She sees him consider and discard the possibility of a clean escape. Instead he tucks his hands into his pockets and waits for her, his gaze fixed and attentive even in the muted glow of the street lights. Gertrude draws to a stop a respectable distance away.

He’s about of a height with her, but he carries himself like a taller man, spine straight and shoulders back, unflinching in a way that predisposes her to like him. He looks to be about her age as well as her height, although a few close-cropped strands of silver shine bright and stark against the backdrop of otherwise black hair.

“I have an explanation,” he says, without hesitation.

“I don’t doubt that you do,” she replies, her voice warmed unbidden by amusement. “I do doubt that I would find your explanation particularly compelling.”

He sighs. “Regrettable.”

“Indeed. Dare I ask why you’ve been digging through the trash? I know that men of the cloth pride themselves in relinquishing their earthly goods, but I didn’t think those vows were so severe as to reduce one to actual penury.”

He winces. He does a good job of hiding it. “I’m not a priest.”

“No,” Gertrude agrees, and she allows a thin smile to curl her lips. “Not anymore. See something that shook your faith, did you?”

It’s a guess, but her guesses are often good ones. She _knows_ things that she shouldn’t sometimes, more and more with every passing year. It’s a good guess, so she’s surprised when he says, “No.”

“No,” he says, “My faith remains intact. I just—found a better way to serve.”

The noise Gertrude makes is noncommittal, because that’s the most flattering noise she can bring herself to make in response to such a statement. She considers a moment, and then she extends a hand. “Gertrude Robinson. I’m the Archivist.”

She doesn’t tell him because she wants him to know. She tells him because she’s interested to watch his response, and find out whether she’ll see recognition on his face or polite confusion.

His hand flexes in hers. Oh, yes. He knows who the Archivist is. _What_ the Archivist is. There’s no fear on his face, no wrath, just a quiet sort of curiosity. Whatever he considers his mission, it doesn’t include her, and she can work with that.

“Perhaps we can reach an accord,” she says. “You’ll tell me why you’re here, and everything you know about Linus Blakeley.” She’ll tell him—probably nothing, if she thinks she can get away with it, but she _is_ the Archivist. She’s certain she can think of something worthy of the trade, if it comes to that, something she doesn’t mind parting with.

He gives her hand a gentle squeeze before releasing her. She doesn’t think he’s missed that she’s offered him little in exchange for the information she wants. “Adelard Dekker, and yes. Yes, perhaps we can.”

**

They end up at a late night café in Central London. Gertrude orders a cup of tea and resists the urge to pick idly at the peeling edge of the Formica tabletop. They’re nearly the only patrons; it’s too late for most and too early for those crowding into bars and music venues to have staggered out again. There are two women at one of the neighboring tables, one clad in enough leather that Gertrude chafes just looking at her and the other with hair bleached to a brilliant white-blonde, her fringe brushed so far into her eyes that Gertrude wonders how she navigates the world. They make her feel a little old.

“Those Cadbury girls, though—.”

“God, but you know they—.”

“Of course I know, but— _those Cadbury girls._ ”

Her friend snorts with laughter, disagreement reduced to a balled up napkin thrown across the table.

Adelard Dekker has been telling her his story. She had asked for it, but she had asked carefully, without the hunger of her god twisted around the question. She knows too well now at what cost her curiosity is sated. She knows what her curiosity feeds. Her caution isn’t reserved only for the enemies she confronts outside of the Archive’s doors.

“I’d known her all my life,” he says. “She was my mother’s friend, and the catechist at my childhood church. I didn’t always like her, but the look on her face when she read the psalms was the first word for _faith_ that I ever learned, and suddenly I was the only one who knew it. That look. That _face_. Instead there was another woman in her place, and everyone else was calling that woman by her name and asking for the recipe for her famous Christmas stollen, which—the Ursula I had known had barely been able to get jelly to set.” He takes a sip from his coffee. “I confronted her eventually. She almost killed me. She _would_ have killed me, but I got in a lucky hit. Swiped her across the face with the processional cross and managed to lock the door to the rector’s office behind her. It was clear that the door wouldn’t hold her for long, so I ran.” He meets Gertrude’s gaze levelly, but she doesn’t disapprove. She knows the wisdom of avoiding a fight when one is confronted by a foe with superior strength and no immediate way of leveling the playing field.

“She was gone by morning, and I began to doubt that the best way for me to fulfill my duty was to continue my work with the church. I resigned only a few weeks later, and I began to seek the—the _thing_ which had replaced Ursula.”

“Did you find it?” Gertrude asks, although she already suspects the answer.

“The _NotThem_?” Gertrude lifts a brow, and Adelard looks vaguely chagrined but soldiers on. “That’s what I call it. I’m not sure if it has a proper name, but somehow I doubt it. Why have a name when it’s so intent on stealing other people’s?” Astute of him, and once again Gertrude feels the faint stirrings of approval. Already to her the thing he had met sounds like a creature of what Smirke had called _the Stranger_ , and they don’t often trade in names, at least not ones which rightly belong to them. Adelard Dekker has managed to piece together much for knowing so little. “To answer your question, no. I’ve caught the scent a time or two, and arrived just in time to see the wreck it’s made of someone else’s life, but I’m no closer to putting a stop to it than I was six years ago.”

Gertrude still does not intend to offer him much, but, “The Archives are vast, and we do welcome— _visiting academics_.” Diana would welcome whomever Gertrude asked her to in exchange for a piece of black forest gâteau from the bakery near Gertrude’s flat. “You could go through the statements, see if anyone has had an experience with this _NotThem._ If you help me with Linus Blakeley.”

For a long moment, Adelard is silent. Finally he says, “Archivist,” and then, “Gertrude. It’s a poor thing to be offered a potential ally and try to turn that into a—a negotiation.” Gertrude would have thought herself immune to recriminations by now, but her cheeks are suddenly hot. It’s been so long since she blushed that the sensation feels alien. “I’ll help you with your monster, and then maybe, if you are so inclined, you’ll help me with mine. It’s as simple as that.”

It’s been a long time since she’s had any ally but Emma, and Emma is so often gone. “You think he’s a monster?”

“You doubt that he is?”

“Not particularly.”

“Why are you so interested in Blakeley?”

She thinks of Agnes’ dark, burning eyes. She thinks of the fire raging in her own lungs.

“Another negotiation,” Gertrude says. She takes a sip of her now tepid tea. “That’s all.”

**

Another negotiation.

Every conversation with James is a negotiation.

The researchers that Gertrude had taken exception to have left the office, proverbial tails between their legs and significantly more literal termination papers in hand.

“Are you satisfied?” James asks.

She’d known James Wright for the better part of a decade before he’d become the Director of the Magnus Institute. He’d been inoffensive to the point of blandness, the sort of person who thought that sensible shoes and a pension plan were an adequate substitute for a personality, which was, conversely, probably why he’d weathered his tenure in Artefact Storage so well: not enough imagination to be troubled by nightmares. He’d had a peculiar way of speaking to her, like every word was also an apology for daring to exist in the same space as Gertrude. He doesn’t speak to her like that now.

She’d known Richard Mendelson for the better part of a decade as well, before his death. He’d been the one to appoint her to the position of Head Archivist, barely a year after she had started her employment at the Institute. For a time, she had considered him something of a mentor. She’d sat across this same desk from him so many times, talking late into the night, aglow with his faith in her and the easy way that he treated her more like a colleague and an equal than a subordinate, confiding in him all of her half-formed ideas about Smirke’s Fourteen and those that served them, the litany of horrors that came tripping through her Archives every day. She’d certainly known him well enough to recognize his eyes staring out of another man’s face, and to hear the cadence of his words heavy on another man’s tongue.

“Of course I’m satisfied,” she says as she stands. She has no interest in lingering in this office. Not these days. “I got everything I wanted.”

“I’m so pleased to hear that,” James says. He appears to mean it. She blames her own complacency for the cold shock that goes through her body when he adds, “I understand that you’ve had a visitor. I had worried that you might be—distracted.”

He watches her knowingly, a small smile on his lips. Gertrude squares her shoulders.

“James,” she says. _Richard_. “When have you ever known me to become _distracted_?”

She stares at him down the bridge of her nose and across the broad, glossy mahogany expanse of his desk. His smile wilts, and he raises his hands. “Of course. I meant no offense.”

“None was taken,” Gertrude says, and it’s true. There had been a time when the opinion of the man sitting on the other side of that desk might have mattered to her, but that time is passed. “If that’s all?”

“Yes,” James says. There’s some pleasure to be taken still in how he now seems as eager to see her gone as she is to go.

“Excellent,” Gertrude says. Her hand is already on the door, prying it open, and she ignores the weight of his eyes upon her as she departs.

**

“Gertrude—.”

“Not now, please.” Any response Eric might make is cut short by the closing of Gertrude’s office door. The faint scent of the cigarette he had hastily snubbed out after hearing her heels on the stairs chases her all the way to her desk.

The meeting with James and Institute’s former researchers had been satisfactory, so she spends her morning in a desultory attempt at catching up on her paperwork. Her conversation with Adelard Dekker the night before is still turning over in her head. He’d offered her much of interest, but little of use. The _NotThem_ might have been foremost in Dekker’s mind, but it was certainly not the only oddity to cross his path. There was a coffin that sang in the rain, a description that Gertrude remembers from several of the statements, and Dekker had tracked it as far as a freighter operated by Solus Shipping PLC and bound for Tilbury. He’d not found the coffin, but there had been a promising lead when he heard rumors of a dock worker having some kind of breakdown consisting of, near as Gertrude can gather, a great deal of weeping and rambling about being trapped in the dark beneath the earth. The _trapped in the dark_ part had turned out to be literal – he’d been stuck in an empty cargo container for three days – but there had been inconsistencies to his story. He had described wandering a vast, labyrinthine space with no light to navigate by, effectively blind, alone but for the growing sense that there was something out there in that pitchy black, watching him, waiting for hunger and thirst and exhaustion to make him easy prey. Needless to say, the description does not match up with the forty foot long steel box he had been found in.

According to the security guard who had heard him screaming and the paramedics who had transported him to the hospital, the container hadn’t even been locked.

Perhaps it had simply been dehydration and panic, but Dekker had thought it worth following up on. There had been a number of avenues to pursue, but he eventually decided to investigate the man that his beleaguered dock worker last remembered speaking to: Linus Blakeley, who had confronted him at the port about a missing shipment. The man hadn’t known anything about a lost shipment, and Blakeley had left angry.

“Not out of character, from what I know of him,” Gertrude had told Dekker over the dregs of her tea, “but also not his preferred method of taking a victim. Perhaps Blakeley intended to cook him in that container and got interrupted—.”

“ _Cook_ him?”

“We can discuss that later. What did you learn about Blakeley?”

What he had learned wasn’t much. He had watched the Blakeley residence for a day or so before he’d resorted to rooting around in their uncollected trash, and a few things had stood out as strange: people came and went at all hours, although the house was never lit after dark, and Linus himself had never made an appearance.

So—certainly outside of the ordinary, but also not much for her to go on.

Margaret’s church group seems her only lead at present, and Dekker has agreed to attend with her. Gertrude does not examine her tentative pleasure at the thought of having someone to safeguard her back. Her own wits would be sufficient, she’s certain, but he’s potentially useful, and that’s all, and that’s enough.

She leaves the Archives at lunch without any clear intention of returning that day. Perhaps she’ll continue her work on Linus Blakeley; perhaps she’ll just return home and pursue her own projects and goals, of which there are more with every passing week. Instead she finds herself standing on the pavement outside of Claridge’s.

The hotel shows little of the previous spring’s strife, picket lines long since gone even as they’ve sprung up everywhere else in the city. Gertrude strides through the front doors unimpeded, and the lift attendant is kind enough not to attempt conversation. The creak of the gate closing sounds like a reproach made by Gertrude’s better judgment. She ignores it.

Gertrude’s knuckles have barely touched the door when Agnes pulls it open, as though she’s been waiting. As though she’d _known_ that Gertrude would come.

Agnes stands there at the threshold. Her fingers twitch against the edge of the door, fidgeting. Gertrude had never reckoned Agnes as a fidgeter. “Won’t you come in?” she asks eventually, with the same stiff, practiced courtesy she had used when accepting Gertrude’s offer of tea. It’s a strange kind of awkwardness. She doesn’t read as embarrassed or timid, but she sounds like she’s reading from a script, going down some mental checklist she has for this encounter.

It’s enough to make Gertrude curious, and because she’s curious she prods as she follows Agnes into the hotel room. “Why so formal, dear? Surely you and I are past the point of standing on ceremony, given our circumstances.” She hadn’t intended to remove her coat because she doesn’t plan to stay, but the room is uncomfortably warm and she reluctantly lets the heavy wool slide down off her shoulders.

“Given what you did to me, you mean,” Agnes says, but she doesn’t sound angry, and she takes the coat from Gertrude’s hands unprompted, draping it across the arm of a nearby sofa.

“Yes.” Gertrude’s response is immediate. She’s occasionally been embarrassed by the ease with which the Mother of Puppets had led her along by the nose, but she’s never experienced a moment’s doubt that hobbling someone as dangerous as Agnes had been the right thing to do. “Should I be worried that this whole thing is part of some elaborate revenge scheme?”

“No,” Agnes says, as quick and as certain in her response as Gertrude had been in hers.

Gertrude studies her. “I’ve always wondered about that,” Gertrude admits. “Why you chose not to pursue—let’s call it the most _direct_ solution to any problems posed by my binding you. If not you, then your followers.”

“You truly don’t know?” Her gaze is steady, intent.

“Enlighten me.”

Agnes doesn’t immediately respond, and Gertrude measures the silence in her own steady breathing. _In, out, one, two, three, four, five_. Finally, Agnes says, “It was their decision as much as mine. Dieg—one of my disciples worries that hurting you would hurt me. They’ve _protected_ you, more than once.”

“The possibility frightens them so much?”

Agnes shrugs, unconcerned, as though the idea that Gertrude’s death would lead to her own is something disconnected from her entirely. “Who wouldn’t be frightened by that? _God is dead, God remains dead, and we have killed him_.”

Gertrude’s short, snorted out laugh surprises even her. The faint smile that graces’ Agnes lips in response is equally surprising. “Ah. I see. I imagine the prospect _literally_ killing god might unnerve anyone.”

For a moment they just stand there, surrounded by all of the grandeur that Agnes’ status as _god_ has bought her. Agnes looks no more at home here than she had in Gertrude’s office.

“Why did you come here?” Agnes asks.

Gertrude wishes that she knew.

“We have an arrangement,” Gertrude says coolly. “I was under the impression that you might want a report on my progress. If that’s not the case—.” She reaches for her coat.

“No,” Agnes says quickly. “You’re right. Tell me what you’ve found.”

Gertrude’s feet find steady ground, and she sits on the edge of the sofa’s cushions secure in the knowledge that she is staying only because she has been asked to. Agnes hovers over her, delicate hands twisting together until she untangles them to reach for the tongs atop the white-draped drinks cart beside the sofa. Gertrude waves her off, taking the tongs herself. “If you’ll allow me,” she says, “I prefer my gin over ice, not boiling water.”

Gertrude pours a second glass on a whim, handing it to Agnes. She had been right: the condensation on the glass turns opaque the moment Agnes wraps her fingers around it and clears almost immediately thereafter, and when it does Gertrude can see only clear liquid clinging to the inside of the glass. Nothing that Agnes touches can help but melt, or burn.

It’s a good reminder. Gertrude can’t very well afford to do either.

“Let me tell you what I’ve learned of the prodigal accountant,” she says.

**

Gertrude is in a church. She rather wishes that she weren’t.

The company isn’t bad, at least. Some of the company. Adelard Dekker presses her hand against the bend of his arm solicitously. For a former priest, he’s _remarkably_ good at lying. They don’t outright present themselves as man and wife, but they allow Margaret Blakeley’s worship group to assume, and Adelard’s easy way with the attendees provides a level of social lubrication that Gertrude would probably be incapable of manufacturing on her own.

Adelard’s hand gives hers a squeeze, which she takes to mean that she hasn’t been attentive enough to the conversation and is now required to say something. “That’s a lovely pendant,” Gertrude manages, and it is: bright silver etched with the shape of something almost like a hand, the palm crisscrossed with one long, curved line and several shorter ones.

Linus Blakeley is present and accounted for, and the moment it seems feasible for Gertrude to go back to ignoring the person she and Adelard are speaking with in favor of watching her quarry out of the corner of her eye, she does so. He’s not much to look at: average build, average height, dishwater hair and the patchy start of a beard, as though he’s started to grow it in but hasn’t quite committed. As dull as the rest of what she knows of him, save only the parts claimed by Agnes.

Eventually, Adelard decides that they’ve socialized their way through an acceptable portion of the crowd and can approach Margaret and Linus. Margaret reaches for Gertrude’s hands as though they’re bosom friends. Gertrude clamps her teeth together into something that might pass as a smile and forces herself not to slap Margaret’s manicured fingers away. “You came,” Margaret says, in her languid way but with a hint of what might be genuine pleasure. She’s still holding on to Gertrude’s hands, and Gertrude is reminded that animals caught in a trap will often chew off their own paws to escape. It’s a tempting prospect. She pretends she can’t see the way that Adelard’s smile has gone from polite to amused as he watches them.

Linus is watching them too and, upon closer examination, Gertrude has to admit that there is one remarkable thing about him: his eyes are much darker than the rest of his coloring would have suggested, a brown so deep that they look black in the dim fluorescents of the church, half of which are burned out. Clearly the collection plate hasn’t been doing much to cover maintenance.

She shakes his hand when he offers it, mostly because it gives her an excuse to extract herself from his wife. “Gertrude.”

“I know who you are,” he says, with a big, friendly smile. Tension has barely begun to thread its way through Gertrude’s shoulders when he adds, “My Peggy was so pleased to meet you. She told me all about it. Kind of you to come by. We’ve just moved from our old neighborhood, and I’m afraid she doesn’t get as many visitors as she used to.”

Margaret is silent while he speaks, smiling blandly. Gertrude remembers Adelard’s stories of people arriving at the house at all hours. “I’m sure a woman as charming as your wife never lacks for company,” she says, but if she’s struck any kind of nerve with the observation then neither of them show it.

“We’re about to get started,” Linus says. “You two should take a seat. We can speak more later.”

Adelard is clearly focused on the meeting as it progresses, and although Gertrude is reluctant to rely on someone else’s observations even under the best of circumstances she finds herself bored enough to allow her mind to wander. The lights flicker erratically above them, and after an interminable period of time which the clock on the wall assures Gertrude is just under an hour, everything finally seems to be winding to a close.

Irritation stirs briefly in Gertrude’s chest, because she’s learned _nothing_ —she knows where Blakeley spends his Thursday nights, which might be enough to satisfy Agnes if all she intends to do is corner him and demand a reckoning for his lapsed faith, but if she truly wants deeper answers as to the cause then Gertrude has wasted her evening and not come any closer to fulfilling her end of the bargain.

Margaret is reading something aloud. Gertrude thinks it might be a psalm; she’s not religious, but she is well-read. It’s one of the more macabre ones, something about being trapped in the grave at the behest of a wrathful god.

“You have laid me in the lowest pit, in a place of darkness in the abyss—.” There’s a strange fervor to Margaret’s voice, the most animated Gertrude has ever heard her. Her face is lit from within and, unbidden, Gertrude thinks of Adelard’s words that night at the café: _the look on her face when she read the psalms was the first word for faith that I ever learned_.

Gertrude turns her gaze away.

Across the room, Linus is sitting in a pew not far from his wife. He isn’t watching Margaret as she reads. His eyes, as black and as still as dark water, are fixed on Gertrude.

**

By mutual, unspoken agreement Gertrude and Adelard do not stay for further conversation with Linus, nor to partake in the stale biscuits and indifferent coffee served after the meeting. Gertrude gives an involuntary shiver as the cold night air hits her, and Adelard begins to hastily pull on his gloves. “Did you get what you came for?”

“No,” Gertrude says, because there seems to be no point in denying it. “Anything helpful to contribute?”

“Careful, Gertrude, or I’ll begin to believe you value my opinion,” he replies. His voice is bone dry and there’s a faint smile on his face, although it fades when she turns her head to look at him. “Not really, no. There’s something strange about that church, though. I think I’ll look into it further.”

“Let me know if you find anything?”

“Of course.”

Gertrude returns to her flat alone. There’s a billboard with an advertisement for Players No. 6 cigarettes along her route, old enough that the long strips of paper have faded and begun to peel away. The smiling woman emblazoned across the billboard is missing part of her cheek and most of a shoulder, but Gertrude can feel the eyes following her, and she can't entirely chalk up the sensation to the late hour and her imagination. She hunches into the collar of her coat and tells herself it’s to ward off the chill.

She sleeps restlessly and crawls out of bed early. It’s started raining at some point during the night, and she wakes to the steady drumbeat of it against the walls. The windows are streaked with water, obscuring her view of the street below. Idly, Gertrude wonders if they’ll see snow again before the weather turns warmer. With nothing else to do, she readies herself for the day and heads to the Institute.

It’s early enough that she has good odds of having the Archives to herself, so she’s a little surprised to find the lights on and the door leading from the silent, empty lobby down into the Archives already unlocked. There’s no music playing, which she would expect were Eric to be here with every reasonable expectation of being alone. Her shoulders go tight and she shifts her grip on her dripping umbrella. For just a moment Angus Stacey’s face looks up at her from the worn cork flooring between the shelves, skin ripped away from bone to leave him with a permanent, red-streaked grin. It’s ridiculous. She’s jumping at shadows, or at memories, which is almost worse. Angus has been dead for fifteen years, and the thing that had killed him nearly as long as that. She forces her hand to relax its hold on the umbrella.

Eric is sitting at the table, idly turning his ashtray against the wood. There’s a cigarette in his hand, but it’s long since burned out, ash sitting heavy at the tip. He doesn’t look up when she enters, and all of Gertrude’s earlier tension comes rushing back. “Eric?” she asks. She tries to force her voice gentle, but it’s never come naturally to her and some of the wariness she’s feeling is threaded through.

He finally lifts his head, and all her worry about some new horror having found its way into the Archives is replaced by a different kind of concern: his eyes are red-rimmed and he looks startled, as though he hadn’t even heard her enter. “Gertrude.” He stares at her for a long moment before returning to his contemplation of the ash tray. “Emma’s back.”

“What—.”

He shakes his head. “Talk to Emma.”

**

They’ve been sitting in Gertrude’s office for the better part of twenty minutes. Emma has pulled her chair around the desk so that they’re sitting side by side, both of them looking at the door and the macramé owl on the wall rather than at each other. Gertrude had passed over her kettle in favor of filling two of her teacups from the previously unopened bottle of vodka in her bottom drawer. Neither of them have touched their drinks, for all that Emma is still clutching at hers like a lifeline.

“It seemed—it seemed like a bit of good luck,” Emma says. Unlike Eric, her eyes are dry and her voice is steady. There is a reason that Emma has always been Gertrude’s favorite. “Maybe it really was, or—not luck, obviously, not given what happened, but coincidence. We went back and talked to the husband and he told us the truth this time.” She smiles a little wanly at Gertrude. “Would’ve been better if you’d taken his statement when he first came in.”

From Eric, it would have been a subtle reproach, but Emma has always been further in Gertrude’s confidence and understood better her work away from the Magnus Institute. 

“He told us about the coffin. About hearing it sing and watching his wife disappear into it. I—Fiona and I did some follow up. It came in on some ship called _The Whippoorwill_ earlier this week, and when I went to dig into the shipping records I found that, having done its nasty work with Mrs. Crowther, it was being shipped out again. Different ship. Different shipping company. _The Stygian_. Outer Bay Shipping. Bound for Bergen this time, but the same dreadful cargo. The ship was supposed to sail the next morning, so we,” Emma clears her throat and takes a sip from her cup to wash down whatever has got caught there, “we managed to—to, ah, reroute—.” Emma sighs. “We stole it.”

Gertrude begins to imagine petite Emma and brittle Fiona man-handling a coffin into the back of Emma’s bright yellow ’69 Renault, but now isn’t the moment for such levity, given what she knows comes at the end of this story. “How?”

The rise and fall of Emma’s shoulders looks more like another sigh than it does a shrug. “Hard times for everyone, and plenty of trucks sitting empty at night, even with the lorry drivers back to work. We bribed a couple of the boys working late at the port to load it up for us and bring it here once they were sure they were in the clear. I thought we’d keep it out of the wrong hands, keep it from hurting anyone else, and Sonja would be happy to have something new to poke and prod.” There’s a little catch to Emma’s voice when she inhales. “She’s up there right now, draping it in chains. You know things are bad when _Sonja_ thinks an artefact is too dangerous to study.”

What had convinced Sonja that the coffin was not to be trifled with – what had happened after its arrival at the Institute – remains unspoken. Gertrude is too fond of Emma to make her relive it a second time but, unbidden, Emma says, “I never would have left her alone with it if I’d known. I thought—I thought that it would be fine. I was only going to be gone a moment. I figured the worst that would happen was that I’d come back and find her unconscious on the floor.” She has a tiny smile on her lips when she meets Gertrude’s eyes, and it’s a old shared joke at Fiona’s expense that would play better if the woman wasn’t gone, irrevocably gone. Emma’s smile falls away. “I never—you know that right?”

Gertrude tries to force her voice gentle, but it’s never come naturally to her. She tries anyway, because Emma has always been her favorite. “I know.”

She reaches out a hand, and Emma flinches back reflexively. Gertrude stops, fingers hovering a millimeter from Emma’s face. “Gertrude?”

“I’m sorry, my dear,” Gertrude says, reaching out to grasp the thing that shines silver against Emma’s straight, ashy fringe. “You must have brushed up against something in the Archives as you came through. Here, see? A cobweb.”

“Oh,” Emma says, and she says little else after that.

They finish their drinks without much enthusiasm and Gertrude sends Emma home, with strict orders not to return to the Institute for at least a day or two. She’ll clear it with James later. When she emerges into the Archives, Eric is waiting for her.

“I asked Emma to tell—.”

“Yeah. I know. I’m on my way out.” His mouth is doing something strange, but he doesn’t see fit to share whatever is going through his head and Gertrude can’t motivate herself to ask. He drops a file folder on the table between them. “Here. Found it a couple days ago. I tried to tell you, but you were—preoccupied.”

“What is it?”

“Linus Blakeley. Or, well, his father. Joshua Blakeley. Statement was given way back in ’52, which is why it took me a while to dig it out. There’s not a lot of follow-up – from what I hear, old Stacey never was big on figuring out what happened _after_ the statements were given – but one of his assistants must’ve been a bit more keen, because there’s a note with the file.” His mouth does that strange something again, and this time Gertrude doesn’t have to wonder why. Fiona had been one of Angus’ assistants, the only one to survive him. It’s an unwelcome reminder. “Statement giver disappeared, two weeks almost to the day after the statement was made.”

Gertrude touches the file. For a moment she considers leaving it where it sits, ringing up to a room at Claridge’s and saying that there is no way she can help put Agnes’ house in order when her own is in such disarray. She knows that she won’t. She needs the information that Agnes has promised her if she’s to avert greater disasters than the one that has come to her door tonight. She wants—.

It doesn’t matter what she wants.

“Thank you, Eric,” she says, scooping the file up off of the table and ignoring the way that the dust shed from the pages makes her nose tingle and itch. “Now go home.”

He gives her a half-hearted wave, and he’s gone. Gertrude isn’t far behind him.

Adeline is at her station near the front doors now, and she stops Gertrude as she passes. “Mr. Wright says he’ll handle any notifications of family or friends, if there are any to be made,” she says, so inappropriately chipper about relaying the message that Gertrude is forced to give her the gimlet eye. Unlike so many others, Adeline is unaffected, smiling at Gertrude beatifically. “I have a message for you, too. From a Mr. Dekker?”

Gertrude’s fingers twitch. She takes the sheet of paper Adeline offers her and tucks it in with the file Eric had unearthed from the Archives, and then she goes upstairs, to the first floor domain of Sonja Petrovic in Artefact Storage.

The coffin has been given pride of place among the other horrors, dead center of the storage room B, the tapestry of an eye that has hung in the room for the entirety of Gertrude’s tenure providing a dramatic backdrop. Sonja is silent, sweat beading her hairline from wrestling the chains on herself. The hair, in its long, whip-like braid, is gray, but the face it frames is youthful. Sonja is younger than Gertrude by almost a decade, and her hair hadn’t been gray when she had started here.

“Thank you,” Gertrude says pointedly, and Sonja departs with a grunt.

Gertrude isn’t sure why she’s here. There’s nothing she can do. She knows that.

She _knows_ that.

She knows the same way that she knows that they won’t be able to keep the coffin. It is too big for these walls, and it might be negotiated with, were she of the mind to do so, but it won’t be contained. Having it here has cost them much, and it will offer them little.

“I’m sorry,” Gertrude says. She feels regret, and perhaps eventually she will feel grief for that silly old woman who had haunted the Archives and told tales of the Blitz and tried, so desperately hard, to make herself useful.

She feels determined. Having the coffin here has cost them much, and one day Gertrude will find a way to pay that back in full.

She brushes her hand against the lid of the coffin, fingers grazing over rough wood and cool metal chains. _Do Not Open_. The words are carved deep and jagged into the wood. Such an obvious warning. Such an obvious trap.

(There is nothing she can do. There is something she _might_ do. She knows that too, and she knows the risks. She has so much left to be done. Experience has made her cautious.)

“Goodbye, Fiona,” Gertrude says, and she pretends she can’t hear the coffin’s song between her ears as she departs.

**

Gertrude flags a stunted black taxi cab to take her home. She usually doesn’t allow herself such indulgences, but today she feels her age: still shy of forty, but with tension coiled thick enough to ache at the base of her spine and an answering throb in her temples and her knees. The interior of the cab is dark, the sunlight too weak to penetrate through heavy clouds and windows that haven’t been cleaned since Wilson was first in office. She keeps a small metal penlight in her handbag, has for years, and she pulls it out now to read Adelard Dekker’s message.

_Church decommissioned in ’73_ , it says, in Adeline’s flowery hand. _Something fishy. Please advise_.

She puts the message aside and turns her attention to the file that Eric had found her.

_Statement of Joshua Maxwell Blakeley, given 17 March, 1952 at the Magnus Archives, London. Statement is as follows: There is a monster under my son’s bed._

Gertrude reads.

**

“I believe I have something.”

Agnes watches Gertrude pace. “Are you,” she hesitates, dawdles over the words as though they’re unfamiliar, as she always seems to do, “all right?”

Gertrude ignores the question. “None of it made much sense at first, I’ll admit, but I do think I’ve pieced all—well, most of it together now, and—.”

“Gertrude,” Agnes says, and she’s suddenly there, blocking Gertrude’s path until it’s either stop or risk burning herself on all of Agnes’ blistering, scalding heat. For a moment Gertrude feels positively stupid with that decision, limbs twitching like she’ll continue forward even knowing what the consequences are, and she forces herself still, forces her spine stiff and straight. “Something isn’t right. What’s happened?”

“Someone died,” Gertrude says, short. Not quite, but close enough. “One of mine.” That’s the sticking point. She had thought Fiona silly, doesn’t always like Eric, likes Emma probably more than is convenient or safe given her mission, but they’re all _hers_ , and now something has come into _her_ Archives and robbed her of the use of one of _her_ assistants. It’s natural that she would feel… unsettled. “Nothing to concern yourself with.”

“Oh,” Agnes says, and for a long time she says only that. Her eyes are wide and dark, and her cheeks are flushed. She seems to be struggling to find anything else to say. “I’m—sorry?” She sounds uncertain, no better at this even than Gertrude is, for all that she seems sincere.

“Why?” Gertrude asks, and watches with some amount of petty satisfaction as Agnes visibly flounders for an answer. “You’ve done worse. You’ve burned the flesh from someone’s bones and called it sacrament. Or fun. I’ve never quite been sure.” She snorts. “ _I’ve_ done worse. Why should you be sorry?”

Agnes considers. She shrugs. “It’s something people say when there’s a death. Isn’t it?”

Some of the wind goes out of Gertrude. She flatters herself that she’s done a good job of hiding it. “I suppose.”

“Can I—can I get you anything? Tea, or—.”

Gertrude almost smiles. “Are you attempting to comfort me?” Agnes’ eyes narrow. She doesn’t answer, and that’s answer enough. “You’re quite bad at it.”

“I never had much opportunity to learn.”

Gertrude almost asks if Agnes feels sorrow and regret at the death of someone known to her, or simply the rejoicing of her god at the resultant pain of those left behind. Agnes has people too, and she’s lost some of them. Some of them she’s lost to Gertrude, although Gertrude has yet to find a way of neutralizing the members of Agnes’ cult that doesn’t result in the kind of mess that makes it almost more worthwhile to simply leave them to their own devices. They’re very big on collateral damage, the Lightless Flame crowd. She’ll figure it out eventually. “I would like to focus on the work,” she says, “if we could.”

Agnes studies Gertrude for an uncomfortably long moment and Gertrude is uncertain whether her discomfort, the way she feels raw under that gaze, is a result of who and what Agnes is or simply the effects of a long and trying day. Eventually Agnes nods, and they end up seated at either end of the sofa.

“In 1952,” Gertrude says, “a man named Joshua Blakeley gave a statement at the Institute. His young son had developed a sudden terror of the dark. Not unusual for a child, as I understand it.” She had little firsthand experience. “He wouldn’t stay in his bed at night. He was convinced that there was a monster waiting beneath it, looking for the opportunity to do him some harm. When Blakeley senior attempted to solve the problem by placing a nightlight in his son’s room, he found the bulb burned out in the morning and the boy sitting sleepless in the bathroom, having stayed there all night with the lights on. This pattern repeated for several nights, and it was beginning to take a toll on the child’s health. Joshua decided that a more direct approach to making his son feel safe in his bed at night was needed. He’d served during the war. He still had his old service pistol. He took it from the wardrobe, and when it came time for the lights to go out and his son to go to bed, he set himself up in a chair in the corner of the room. He still thought that a dodgy electrical outlet and an overactive imagination were to blame, you see, and he hoped that his presence might provide enough of a sense of safety and security for all of that fear to fall by the wayside.”

“Did it work?” Agnes asks. She does not sound like she particularly expects a _yes_.

“They sat there a while in the dark. Neither of them slept, but Joshua was content so long as his son remained in bed; he figured that sleep would come eventually, inevitably. After an hour or so, Joshua heard a scratching from beneath the bed. He made a great show of going to check on it. Perhaps they had mice. Perhaps he would be able to provide an explanation that would put an end to all of this senseless terror. At the very least he would be able to reassure his son that there was no monster lurking beneath the bed skirt, waiting to snatch him up. Unfortunately, there was a monster and, given the opportunity, it snatched Joshua Blakeley right up.”

“And this is—true? This happened?”

“I’ve become very good at differentiating the statements that have merit from those that do not.”

“How did he survive to _give_ you a statement?”

Gertrude leans back in her seat. “Joshua was dragged beneath the bed. There was something under there with him. He never did get a good look at what it was. It was too dark. He fired his pistol twice, to no avail. He might not have escaped—were it not for his son’s nightlight, which the boy lit and dropped beneath the bed. When Joshua returned to his senses, he was alone, bleeding, and curled against the wall beneath the bed. Linus Blakeley had saved his father’s life.” She pursed her lips. “For a time, at least. They went to stay with Joshua’s wife’s mother the next day, but you and I both know that such horrors are rarely so localized. Joshua went missing two weeks later. The wife reported it to the authorities, but I doubt they had much reason to look too closely. A man leaves his family in the middle of the night. His son is afraid of the dark. Not much to that story.”

Gertrude can’t read the expression on Agnes’ face. “I wonder if that’s why he came to me,” she says eventually. “To us.”

There’s no way to know for certain, but Gertrude thinks it likely. It’s not unheard of, for someone to offer their devotion to one power in the hope of warding off another. Agnes’ patron provides little light, only heat, but the blunt, consuming terror of the Desolation might be an adequate way to keep the quiet, slinking terrors that lurked in the dark at bay. It might make a man who had once been a boy afraid of the dark feel powerful and strong, with nothing to fear once he’d climbed beneath the covers of the bed that he now shared with his own wife.

“You told me that it was improbable that one of your disciples would lapse in his faith, once he had met you. I’m inclined to believe you. It might be very hard indeed for a man to pursue atheism having met a messiah. But if you weren’t the first power of this world to mark Linus Blakeley? Perhaps he’s simply found a new god to worship. He’s been attending church. A strange kind of church, I’m led to believe. Deconsecrated. I’m guessing that he’s abandoned his usual—tribute, shall we say. He’s made moves that I don’t believe have anything to do with you or your lot. He hasn’t simply faltered. He’s converted.”

Agnes’ gaze is distant, abstracted, turned somewhere within rather than focused on Gertrude. “Yes,” she says eventually. “Yes, you may be right.”

“I am right. Which means the only thing left to do is either to let him go, or to draw him out.”

“Let him go? No.” Now Agnes’ eyes and her attention both return to Gertrude. “It’s time that Linus and I have a little chat.”

Gertrude had never really doubted that Agnes was a jealous god.

“I know how to bait him,” Gertrude says, “but I’ll need something from you.”

“Oh?”

“Reassurance.” Gertrude shifts on the sofa. “You promised me information. I need to know that you actually have what you’ve bartered with. Give me _something,_ Agnes.”

Agnes smiles.

“What?”

Agnes shakes her head. “It’s just—strange. Hearing you use my name.”

If the change of topic is meant to distract Gertrude, it doesn’t work. She just stares at Agnes until the smile evaporates. “There’s a gorilla skin. Carthaginian,” Agnes says. “Those who serve the one you call _Stranger_ need it for their ritual. Does that help?”

Gertrude lets out a breath. It helps. It helps her remember the reason why she’s here. “All right.” She rises from her seat, and for a moment her head swims, a strange and sudden exhaustion that makes her bones ache, as they had waiting in the late winter drizzle outside the Institute for a taxi. She shrugs the sensation off, but she finds Agnes watching her still once she comes back to herself. “I will let you know once everything is in place.” She doesn’t think it will take long. She has no way of contacting Linus directly, but surely his wife is equal to the task, and Margaret Blakeley is much easier to pin down.

“Stay.”

It’s clearly an order. Agnes is accustomed to being obeyed.

Gertrude has never been particularly good at taking orders. “No. I don’t think I will.” They have been attempting to be cordial to each other, and she hasn’t forgotten that Agnes had shown her a level of consideration in the wake of Fiona’s death that can’t come naturally to an avatar of the power that most delights in pain and loss. “Thank you.”

Agnes sighs, brief and frustrated. “It’s late. You’re tired.” The sky has grown dark outside the windows during their conversation, but sunset comes early this time of year; it’s hardly so late that Gertrude couldn’t be expected to find her own way home. Her face must show her skepticism, because Agnes looks away. “If you won’t stay here, then return to your Archives. They’re not _impenetrable_ , you have to know that,” Gertrude does. Angus Stacey’s stripped clean and bloody face had been a very adequate object lesson, “but you’ll be safer there than most places.”

Now Gertrude understands. “Are you _worried_ for me?”

“You intend to provoke Linus. He’s always been easily provoked.” Most of the Cult is, in Gertrude’s experience. “Neither of us know now what he’s capable of.”

He had been capable of quite a lot even before now. He had been capable of burning people alive. Not a gift from his god, perhaps, as it was for some of Agnes’ more devout followers, but Gertrude knows well the power of a jerry can full to overflowing with kerosene and a match. Nothing impressive about that, not really, no more than there is about any other run-of-the-mill arsonist or murderer. Gertrude remembers well, however, Adelard’s story of the dock worker and the container, Linus’ reaction to the loss of a shipment that Gertrude now believes Emma to have stolen. It’s possible that Agnes is correct, and Linus Blakeley is a threat significant enough for Gertrude to need to take precautions. “I’m touched.”

“I told you the other day. You’ve linked my fate to yours. There’s no saying that I would survive whatever he decides to do to you.” Agnes says it blandly. She says it without looking at Gertrude. She says it like she knows that it’s a lie, or at least not the whole truth. More softly, she adds, “Stay here. No one will trouble you. I’ll keep you safe.”

_And who will keep me safe from you?_ Gertrude almost asks, but doesn’t. Agnes Montague doesn’t want her dead. It’s a strange thing to feel so certain of, especially after so many years of believing the opposite. It’s a strange kind of a faith to have.

And Agnes has been right about one other thing. She is so very, very tired.

“Very well,” Gertrude says. “I have a call to make first.”

There’s a phone in the room, but she calls Dekker at the number he had left with Adeline from the lobby, wanting the privacy and a few minutes to breathe away from the crackling heat that fills Agnes’ hotel room. He agrees to contact Margaret Blakeley and listens attentively as Gertrude tells him what she wants him to say. When she suggests that he might wish to avoid offering his name and go to ground immediately thereafter, he seems to take her warning with the seriousness it deserves.

“And me?” he asks, just before she would end the call, nothing but courteous interest in his voice. “Would you like me to accompany you to this meeting?”

He’d been useful at the church. It had been nice having an ally. “Yes. If you would.”

There’s no telling what Blakeley might be capable of.

By the time she returns to the room, Agnes has placed a spare pillow and a blanket on the sofa and retreated to the narrow balcony overhanging the face of the hotel and the street, far below. Gertrude hesitates only a moment before joining her.

The tip of the cigarette casts a faint, eerie red glow across Agnes’ cheeks when she inhales. “May I?” Gertrude asks. Agnes nods, and Gertrude extends her hand. She had meant that Agnes should give her a cigarette of her own from the pack balanced precariously on the balcony railing; when Agnes offers the one she has been smoking, Gertrude hesitates, but only for a moment. She refuses to flinch. She is, however, very careful not to let her skin brush Agnes’ when she takes the cigarette. The paper over the filter feels crisp, delicate, like it’s been lightly singed by even so brief a time spent resting between Agnes’ fingers.

Agnes watches her in the uncertain light bleeding through the glass doors leading back into the hotel room. “Would you let me touch you?” she asks, sudden enough to leave Gertrude feeling off balance. “If I asked you to?”

“That seems,” Gertrude stops, gathering her thoughts and weighing her words. “Dangerous,” she decides.

Agnes doesn’t smile, and she doesn’t speak again. They go inside soon after. The one concession Gertrude makes to comfort is to kick off her shoes before stretching out on the sofa. She doesn’t use the blanket. The room is far too warm for that.

She’s tired, so tired, and yet she lies there, sleepless, for a long time, listening to Agnes’ steady breathing in the dark.

**

Adelard Dekker looks curious when Gertrude meets him in the lobby the next morning, Agnes drifting a few careful steps behind her. “Dekker, Montague,” she says. “Montague, Dekker.” She smiles tightly at him and offers nothing further. He inclines his head to her, accepting the absence of any explanation—for the moment, at least.

Adelard has arranged to meet Linus Blakeley in a warehouse. It’s a cliché, but sometimes clichés serve their purpose. He offers Agnes a hand to help her out of the car when they arrive at their destination, and Gertrude doesn’t miss the way that Agnes looks at her, looks at him, smiles faintly, and shakes her head before carefully edging around him as she stands. It’s not until she catches Adelard looking at her strangely that Gertrude realizes that there’s an answering smile on her own lips.

The three of them proceed inside, the steady rain soaking Gertrude’s coat and plastering Agnes’ hair to her scalp. Gertrude pretends that she hasn’t noticed the faint steam rising from Agnes’ skin or the way she doesn’t even seem to feel the cold in her thin frock. The inside of the warehouse is more obviously a place long since abandoned, windows covered over in paper and bits of loose brickwork fallen from the walls to litter the floor. Most of the lights have long since burned out, but a few bulbs must still be working, because there’s enough light to see Linus Blakeley standing in the center of the room, waiting for them.

He’s alone. Gertrude would have almost been more reassured had he not been. It’s unnerving to find that he clearly feels equal to the task of facing them without reinforcements. He’s dressed in a suit so crisp that she imagines Margaret had pressed it fresh right before he had come to this filthy warehouse to meet them. His hands are in his pockets, and his shoulders are relaxed.

“Agnes,” Linus says, all mock-surprise and genuine delight, and Agnes’ face goes suddenly tense, like she—like she _knows_ something, something Gertrude doesn’t, something that she hasn’t shared. Linus turns his attention to Gertrude. “Archivist.” Then Adelard. “And—hmm. I don’t actually know _who_ you are.”

Adelard offers no response, and eventually Linus shrugs and returns his gaze to Gertrude. “You brought my coffin?”

“No,” Gertrude says. “Did you really think I would?”

“Not really, but I had hoped.” He takes a step forward. “How unfortunate.”

The implication and the threat are both impossible to miss. Before he can come any closer, Gertrude snaps out a question. It almost doesn’t matter which one. “Why are you so interested in the coffin?”

Gertrude’s questions are difficult to resist.

He stops. Shudders. A look of disgust passes over his face. “Oh. I don’t _like_ that. It’s very uncomfortable being _seen_ by you, Archivist.” He forces a smile. “Nature of the beast, I suppose. Is that why I’m here? So I can answer your questions?”

He’s here so that he can answer to Agnes, but when Gertrude turns her head to look at Agnes, that tense, frozen look hasn’t faded. Were it anyone else, Gertrude would call that look _fear_. “For a start,” she says.

He shudders again, and she sees the moment when he allows her compulsion to wash over him. “I’ve always had something of an _interest_ in the machinations of the other powers,” he says. “I was—heh, curious. Funny, isn’t it? That’s supposed to be _your_ purview. I’ve never been able to shake it, however. I had quite the passion for the lost records of the Franklin Expedition, for a time. After that—well, I once spent the better part of two decades chasing down a book of very intriguing woodcuts. Very _elevated_ literature, if you catch my meaning.” He smiles at her again. Gertrude doesn’t smile back. She has no particular interest in Blakeley’s naughty etchings, or whatever it is he thinks that he’s implying. “When I found out that an old acquaintance was in possession of the coffin and had no real interest in keeping it, I thought I might take the opportunity to have a closer look before releasing it back into the world. I never intended to hold on to it for long. I’m not a fool. It’s _dangerous_ , you see.”

There’s no way he could know about the coffin’s most recent victim, so he deserves no credit for the way the comment lands between Gertrude’s ribs and sits there, heavy and dense. She breathes past that lump of cold discomfort and the feeling dissipates, and in its wake is left something else. She studies Linus Blakeley: apple cheeks and dishwater hair, eyes that she can no longer convince herself are merely a dark brown. She finds herself thinking of James Wright, of Richard’s eyes staring out at her from his face, and she knows—.

She _knows_.

“You’re not Linus Blakeley,” she says. “Who are you?”

His smile grows wider.

_“Clever,_ Gertrude.”

It’s not the first time such an accusation has been leveled at her, but she doesn’t like the faintly patronizing tone with which he says it. Her lips part, and she feels the full force of her own patron’s gaze turn inexorably toward her, toward Linus, toward Agnes standing stiff and still beside her and toward Adelard, equally still but in a way that seems more like patience than fear or indecision. The weight of the Beholding shifts from her shoulders, where it usually sits so heavy, to her tongue. It’s a truer weapon than matches or knives or a stolen car with her foot pressed hard against the accelerator, but one that she’s learned to be reluctant to use. She’s not reluctant now. _“Who are you?”_

The smile falls from Blakeley’s lips.

This time, he fights against her for a handful of seconds before giving a dry, breathless chuckle and relenting. “To say that I’m not Linus Blakely would not be entirely accurate. It also wouldn’t be entirely _inaccurate_. I’m Linus Blakeley now, because he was the best option available to me when my previous body began to fail.” He straightens, adjusts the cuffs of his jacket and then ruins it immediately by using one of the sleeves to dab at the sweat that has started to dot his forehead. “It was sudden, you understand. Pancreatic cancer. I was given weeks, and I’d expected to have decades – more than enough time to select someone suitable. Linus was _hardly_ my first choice.” His eyes are black water when he meets Gertrude’s gaze. “I prefer children, generally. Their fear of the dark is so much more _visceral_. I could have done worse than Linus, however. He was marked early by my god, and deeply. He never quite outgrew his terror of the dark. He slept with the hall light on and the door cracked well into adulthood, did you know that?” He flicks a glance in Agnes’ direction. “His connection to you provided me with such delicious inspiration, too. I’d forgotten what a beautiful thing _faith_ could be. Linus’ wife was an eager convert, once I showed her the true power of my patron.” He tilts his head. “She’s taken to calling him _Mr. Pitch_. Isn’t that sweet? _Stellar_ girl, my Peggy.”

“So—I’m Linus, in most of the ways that matter, I’m just not _only_ Linus. I don’t think I’ll remain Linus for long, either. Dreadful name.” He makes a faint, thoughtful sound. “His middle name is Maxwell. That’s much better. _Maxwell Rayner_. It has a nice ring to it, don’t you think?”

Gertrude opens her mouth, another question on the tip of her tongue, and Linus Blakeley—Maxwell Rayner—shakes his head regretfully. “No, Archivist. That’s quite enough from you, I think.”

He’s barely finished speaking when the lights go out.

Everything happens very quickly after that.

Gertrude steels herself, eyes straining in the sudden darkness. Light bleeds through the windows in a few places where the damp has peeled the paper away from the glass, but not enough. She hears something moving in the shadows. She’s already reaching into her handbag, searching for anything that might help. She assumes that it will come for her, or perhaps for Agnes. That is her mistake.

Beside her, Adelard grunts in pain.

Gertrude’s fingers close around the cool metal of her penlight.

It doesn’t provide as much light as a proper torch would, just a thin, diffuse golden glow that does little to breach the darkness. It’s enough: she can see Adelard, struggling with something that refuses to immediately resolve itself into anything. A shadow, she realizes—no, two, so stretched and distorted that she’s not sure she would have recognized them as roughly human in form were it not for the distinctive silhouette of Margaret Blakeley’s coiffure, and what they are grappling with isn’t Adelard, but his own shadow, stretched thin and gray behind him in the dim light she casts.

One of the shadowy figures flinches back when the beam of Gertrude’s penlight brushes against it, shrinking away from even so weak a light. The bulb of the penlight buzzes and goes dark a second later, before Gertrude can fully formulate a plan. Even she’s not entirely certain what she intends to do when she stoops and drags her hands across the ground, not until her fingers close around the jagged edges of one of the pieces of fallen masonry she had noticed upon entering the warehouse. She draws back her arm, and she throws the chunk of brick as hard as she can.

The glass of the windows is old beneath the paper covering it, warped and brittle, and the wood holding it in place has gone rotten with constant wet. One of the panes shatters when hit with her improvised projectile, letting in a stream of thin, gray winter light. It’s not enough. She can hear movement from behind her and Dekker’s ragged breathing somewhere to her left. Gertrude reaches for something else to throw, knowing that it _won’t_ be enough, but—well, she’s hardly going to resign herself to _dying_ in this dark, decaying warehouse.

There’s a crackling noise, and she has another brick in her hand before she realizes that the sound isn’t only adrenaline and the rush of her own frantic blood in her ears. She looks up just in time to see the glass of the windows begin to splinter, slivers of light piercing through in a pattern not unlike a spider’s web but less regular, with no central point of impact like there had been when she had broken that first window.

There’s a loud _crack_ and a rush of dry heat so intense that Gertrude’s eyes and lungs ache. She has just enough time to fling herself toward the place where she had last seen Adelard. She connects with warm flesh and damp wool and takes them both to the ground, hands coming up to protect the back of her neck and her head just as every single one of the warehouse’s windows explode inward.

They’re close enough to the center of the warehouse that very little of the glass hits Gertrude, but the chunk that slices open the back of her right hand is hot enough that it not only cuts, it _burns_. The silence that follows immediately thereafter is the kind so complete that Gertrude is uncertain for a few minutes whether the explosion has actually deafened her.

When she finally sits up, sooner than she might were it not for the need to assess whether there’s any kind of threat remaining, she finds that she and Adelard are alone in the warehouse. Maxwell Rayner and his shadows are gone.

So is Agnes.

Adelard Dekker is very still on the ground. It’s not difficult to ascertain why: the back of his head is wet with blood, and there’s a ruddy dark smear of it on the concrete beneath him. Impossible to tell whether the damage had been done by their unseen assailants or by her when she had tackled him. She presses her fingers against his throat and is distantly relieved to find a pulse.

She’s started to consider what her next move must be when she hears sirens in the distance, far away but approaching rapidly. Someone has called emergency services. Not surprising, perhaps, and maybe not altogether a good thing if it results in her wearing handcuffs again, but in a moment of weakness she allows her eyes to slip shut and relief to wash over her.

She unwinds the scarf from around her neck and presses it against the back of Adelard’s head to try to staunch the bleeding, and she waits.

**

The standard of service at Claridge’s is really quite impressive. The lift attendant barely takes a second glance at the blood still caking Gertrude’s hands to the wrist when she steps on, and he doesn’t say a word, not even when the tip she presses into his gloved fingers is smudged with red.

She finds Agnes in her room. There’s a half-packed suitcase open on the bed, and the doors out onto the balcony open, letting in gusts of frigid winter air that almost successfully disperse the accumulated heat of Agnes’ presence. Beneath the heavy cloud cover outside, the sun has started to dip toward the horizon, but it hasn’t yet set. In the distance Gertrude can hear chanting, occasionally punctuated by someone shouting into a loudhailer. They’re close enough for her to be able to hear the shape of the words but not close enough for her to actually discern their meaning, muffled by the sound of traffic drifting up from below.

Agnes looks completely unscathed by the scuffle in the warehouse. She’s gone stiff and still with a pale pink slip caught between her hands, frozen in place like she’s been caught in the midst of committing a crime.

“I suppose,” Gertrude says, “that I should thank you.”

“For the windows?” Agnes shrugs. “I’m an avatar of destruction.” She meets Gertrude’s gaze levelly. “Or had you forgotten?”

Gertrude’s knuckles still ache. Not all of the blood on her hands is Adelard’s. She has forgotten nothing. “For calling 999.”

It’s a guess, but her guesses are often good ones.

Agnes turns to place the slip in the suitcase, but not before Gertrude sees the corners of her lips turn up in a tiny smile. “You’re welcome.”

Gertrude clears her throat, and nods toward the door she hopes leads to the toilet. “May I?” At Ages’ nod she excuses herself, and spends longer than is perhaps necessary cleaning the gore from her hands with softly scented hotel soap. She shrugs out of her coat and the jumper beneath; the cuffs of both are stained a dull copper. Her shirt has fared better, thankfully. The scarf had, of course, been unsalvageable, and is probably even now sitting in a hospital bin or on the floor of the ambulance that had carried Adelard away.

Agnes is standing where Gertrude had left her, fussing over the pile of clothing on the bed without actually accomplishing anything. Gertrude steps into her space until Agnes moves aside and plucks a bright orange skirt off the bed. The mohair pricks at her newly cleaned fingers as she folds it, much more precisely than Agnes had been doing; from the look of things, she’s been making a hash of packing, toiletries and books and clothing tossed haphazardly into the bag. “I was surprised by your restraint,” she says. “I expected a great deal more fire and brimstone in your handling of Mr. Blakeley, once you found him.”

“Yes,” Agnes says, and nothing else. She’s watching Gertrude neatly roll a pair of nylons with apparent fascination.

“What happened?”

Agnes diverts her gaze from Gertrude’s hands to her face. “I—thought I knew what Linus had become before we met with him. Something like you. Something like me.” Gertrude isn’t sure she likes the comparison or entirely agrees with it, but she’s interested enough in hearing what Agnes has to say not to interrupt. “I didn’t know all of it of course, not really. _Maxwell Rayner_ , and whatever it was he did to Linus. Possession, I suppose. Who could have guessed that? But I was close enough, and I—I didn’t think that I would react like that.” There’s a hint of frustration to her voice, and in her peripheral vision Gertrude can see that Agnes is brooding, something behind her eyes like an oncoming storm. “I knew something like him, like us, once. When I was a girl. Not exactly alike but, as I said, close enough.” She’s silent a moment, before she adds, almost pleasantly, “I killed him.”

Gertrude drapes the shirt she had been holding over the top of the suitcase and turns to face Agnes. “Did you now? Well done.”

The sound Agnes makes is not quite laughter. “I always expect you to know these things. Because of who you are, and because of—because of what we are to each other. I killed him, but I wasn’t—unscathed. It changed me. It _cost_ me.” A smile tugs at her mouth. This time she doesn’t try to hide it. “And then there was you. My _anchor_.”

There’s no anger to her when she says it. She sounds almost fond.

“You took something from me, too,” Agnes says, without reproach. “You and Raymond both stole away some part of what I was, and so when it came time to face Linus I wondered if he would do the same. If it would cost me. How it would change me.” She breathes deep, and when she exhales Gertrude can feel the heat of it against her skin. “I was never meant to change. My purpose, my destiny, those have been mine since the moment I was born and baptized. How many pieces of me can I afford to lose – have _peeled_ away from me – before I’m no longer who I am? _What_ I am? Before I can no longer _do_ what I need to do?”

“Would that be so bad?” Gertrude asks.

Agnes hesitates, but not for more than a moment. “Yes. Yes, it would be.” The distant chant has reached a crescendo. “I told you. It’s my destiny. You carve that away and there’s nothing left of me.” Gertrude isn’t sure what she might say in response to that, and Agnes doesn’t give her the opportunity. “You can’t tell me that _you’ve_ seriously considered abandoning your own purpose, _Archivist_. Do you think that after all these years I haven’t learned anything about you? Maybe one of your predecessors would have bargained for information on the rituals only for the sake of having it, but not you. If you want to know it’s because you intend to _do_ something with that knowledge. Would you just walk away?” There’s a strange, almost wistful note to Agnes’ voice. “Do you ever doubt what it is you’re doing?”

Gertrude really isn’t certain that she _can_ just walk away. The Archives have had hooks in her for so very long. But that’s not the question that Agnes is asking.

“No,” Gertrude says, and she means it.

“No,” Agnes repeats softly. “I didn’t really think so.”

Gertrude takes a step back. “Speaking of the information you promised me, dare I ask about this?” She gestures to the suitcase and takes a moment to study Agnes’ face, the high fine bones of her cheeks and her wide dark eyes. “It seems you intended to leave without saying goodbye. Be honest, my dear, were you _ever_ planning to fulfill your end of our bargain?”

Temper flashes in Agnes’ eyes, brief and hot. Gertrude can feel the press of it against her skin, and she doesn’t think it’s simply her imagination making Agnes’ anger something real and palpable. “There’s a folder on the desk. Everything I know about the rituals. As we agreed upon.”

“Including your own?”

The look on Agnes’ face is answer enough.

The silence stretches between them, until Gertrude asks a question that she should have asked long before— _had_ already asked, if she was being honest, she just hadn’t believed the answer. “Why did you seek me out, Agnes?”

Agnes smiles, reflexively, the same way she does any time Gertrude says her name. It fades immediately. “I told you. I wanted to know you.”

Gertrude breathes in sharp. She thinks that she should tell Agnes that _knowing_ each other is a bad idea, as it always has been, as it still is. The Web had drawn them together, had bound them, and to spend any significant amount of time in each other’s company would undoubtedly be to play perfectly into the Mother of Puppet’s plans, whatever those might or might not be. They both know that. She’d _thought_ that they had both known that.

She doesn’t say any of it. “You asked me,” she says instead, “whether you might touch me.”

It’s stupid, _desperately_ stupid, the most incautious she’s allowed herself to be since taking up the position of Archivist.

Agnes lifts a hand, carefully, her movements slow and deliberate. She reaches out and, even knowing it’s foolish, Gertrude doesn’t move away.

The brush of Agnes’ fingers against the back of her uninjured hand _burns_ , but only for a moment. Gertrude exhales slowly and hears the stuttering breath that Agnes releases form a ragged harmony with her own. Perhaps her spelled circle in Scotland has kept her safe, as it has done for years; perhaps she has simply had that peeled away piece of Agnes living inside of her for so long that she can no longer be seared open from the outside. It doesn’t matter. Not really.

There’s fire in Gertrude’s lungs. She has been burning for years, and when Agnes leans tentatively forward to seal her mouth over Gertrude’s, lips soft and faintly chapped and like nothing so much as skin, she breathes into that destructive heat, fuels it and allows it to grow.

**

Gertrude wakes up alone.

The sheets are still warm, but that means nothing; Agnes might have left hours ago. She tells herself that she is not disappointed, because there’s no point in being disappointed in the inevitable. She pulls on her clothing, although she leaves her coat in a puddle on the floor where she had abandoned it the night before; there’s no point in trying to save it, not now that she’s allowed the blood to set. Her fingers hover over the file folder sitting neatly at the center of the desk. She flips it open. Inside is page after page of cramped, spiky writing on hotel stationery, barely decipherable and only familiar because of the scrap of paper Agnes had given her that first day in Gertrude’s office.

She takes the folder and, with nothing else to do, she makes her way back to the Archives.

She’s a little surprised to find the lights on and to be greeted by the sound of voices from deep within the stacks, until she counts back the days and realizes how much time has passed since last she was here. Eric is sitting with his feet up on the edge of the table, the morning paper blocking most of her view of him from the waist up, although she can see a wisp of smoke rising above a crumpled headline: _Bakhtiar quits after losing army backing._

“Listen to this,” Eric says. “Letter to the editor, right? _I've voted Socialist for forty-two years, but this time I shall vote Tory, so that I can register my protest against these wildcat dictators. It will help to give Mrs. Thatcher the chance to carry out her promises of bringing some sense of sanity, and perhaps respect, back to the meaning of trade unionism._ ” He makes a faint noise, muffled by the cigarette between his lips, and doesn’t so much put the paper down as fling it bodily away from himself, the pages separating from each other and scattering across the floor.

Emma is perched on the edge of the table, hovering over him, and she’s smiling. Gertrude is relieved. She had thought that it might be some time before Emma would smile again; she always forgets that people can be more resilient than she would give them credit for. “You know I’m not very political.”

_“Ugh.”_ She doesn’t doubt that Eric’s disgust is real, but he’s also laughing a little. He braces his foot against the table and uses it to tilt his chair back.

Emma notices Gertrude first. Eric follows her gaze, and the legs of his chair settle back on the floor with a thump. The laughter drains out of his face, like her presence is a wound that bleeds the joy right out of him. 

“I’ll be in my office,” Gertrude says.

She’s almost to her office door when Eric speaks again. “What do you think, Em? Should _we_ strike next? Unsafe working environment, something like that.”

Gertrude freezes.

“Something you would like to say to me, Mr. Delano?” Her voice sounds pleasant to her own ears. Her voice sounds as frozen as her feet against what she’s fairly certain is the same square foot of flooring where Angus Stacey’s corpse had once lain. Pleasant and freezing are not so far apart as one might think.

Eric doesn’t respond.

Later, she will pinpoint this as the moment when Eric decides that he must leave the Archives. He tries many times in the years that follow. When he finally succeeds, Gertrude doesn’t even know it.

**

“I’ve had worse,” Adelard says the moment Gertrude steps through the door to his hospital room.

“I’m certain,” Gertrude says, amusement stirring coyly and quite against her will in the hollow of her chest and at the back of her throat.

She stays longer than she might have had he not been injured chasing after her monsters, when he could have so easily been out hunting his own. “What will you do with the coffin?” he asks, before she leaves.

“I’ll keep it for as long as I can,” Gertrude says, “and if I can find a way to put an end to it, I will.”

“But you don’t think you will.”

“Not everything can be ended,” she says. “Not easily, at least. I’ve found that these things often resist permanent solutions.”

Adelard Dekker will learn to agree with her in time. He will learn it over and over throughout the years: when he finally hears the name Maxwell Rayner again, when he chases down half-truths and rumors that point to the emergence of a new power, whenever the woman he considers his oldest surviving friend does something which compromises his own iron-clad ethics, and on the day when he arrives unannounced on Lawrence Moore’s doorstep and finally manages to trap, but cannot destroy, the creature which he calls the _NotThem_.

(The table, with its intricate web design, arrives on his own doorstep equally unannounced, delivered by a white van so caked in grime that the logo on the side is unreadable. With it is a note, written in a spiky, sloppy hand, which reads simply: _I pay my debts – AM_. He is unable to decipher who the sender might be, but by then Adelard Dekker is far too practical to look a gift horse in the mouth.)

When she learns of his death, Gertrude will not have much room for grief left in her. She will have used it all up over the years: on Fiona, on Eric, on Sarah and poor, doomed Michael, perhaps even a bit on Emma, her first and last true confidant, the poison that she had allowed to fester too long in her Archives. On Agnes.

She will find that she still has some left to spare for Adelard Dekker.

**

Agnes Montague and Gertrude Robinson only ever meet once more in their lives.

The call is unexpected. Through silent agreement, decades have passed since the last time Gertrude saw Agnes, and she had really begun to believe that they _wouldn’t_ see each other again before one of them – probably her – gave in to the inevitability of either time or circumstance. 

They meet at a coffee shop not far from Gertrude’s flat. Gertrude is old, or at least older than she once was. Agnes is not.

“There’s something you need to know,” Agnes says, as she drops into the seat across from Gertrude, before either of them are given the opportunity to say anything so civil as _hello_. It’s for the best. Gertrude has become, if anything, less sentimental with age, but she still doesn’t trust the things that might have slipped from between her lips after _hello_.

Agnes tells her, and Gertrude is—she’s not surprised. She had started to suspect the moment that she had stepped off a boat from a land that didn’t truly exist to the news that not one but two of her assistants were dead, or as good as, within the same twenty-four hour period. Anger clogs her throat, and she honestly can’t say whether the memory of Michael’s wide-open and trusting eyes feed the flames or smother them. His faith in her had been such a lovely thing, so tender and so easily grasped in her hands and between her teeth. She’s not guilty, but that doesn’t mean she can’t regret the necessity.

What Emma has done was not _necessary_.

“She’s the only one I ever told about you, you know,” Gertrude says.

She’s not sure why she says it.

“Gertrude?”

When Gertrude doesn’t immediately respond, Agnes reaches out a hand. Her fingertips hover over Gertrude’s where they rest on the tabletop, radiating heat and the promise of a kind of pain that might be welcome for its simplicity. In the end, Agnes doesn’t touch her. She just looks at her, and that’s almost worse. “Let me do this.”

“I can—.”

“I know,” Agnes says. Her eyes are wide-open and pleading. “I know you can. I’m asking. Please let me do this for you.”

Gertrude’s shoulders and neck feel stiff, and she has learned to be unyielding, so she surprises even herself when she nods.

Her tongue is less pliable than her neck. She does not say _I’ve missed you_. She does not say any of the things she might have said, and she tells herself that she doesn’t regret not saying them.

**

_Arthur asked me to tell you that Agnes Montague is dead_.

Gertrude puts the statement down.

In spite of their connection, she hadn’t felt it when Agnes had died, and yet she finds herself unsurprised. Perhaps some part of her _had_ known. Perhaps this is one more piece of terrible knowledge bestowed upon her by the Beholding.

Gertrude picks up the statement.

Under other circumstances and were he not so clearly committed to her destruction, she might feel bad for Eugene Vanderstock. _God is dead, God remains dead, and we have killed her._

Rosie, who had replaced the inimitable Adeline a year earlier, had handed her an envelope as she walked through the front doors of the Institute. There’s no letter inside, no fond farewells or final confessions, just a message scrawled across the inside flap in spidery, nearly illegible writing that she almost wishes was not so familiar.

_Goodbye. Be safe. – AM_

At the bottom of the envelope is a handful of sawdust.

**

Gertrude does not hate Jack Barnabas when she meets him, and she does not envy him. If anything, she feels a little guilty when she looks at his wounded eyes and scarred cheeks.

It’s probably her fault, if Agnes had thought that her love was a thing that wouldn’t burn.

After she speaks to Arthur, she is forced to revise her opinion on Mr. Barnabas. _“Do you ever doubt what it is you’re doing?”_ Agnes had asked her, years earlier. It had taken Gertrude a long time to realize that the answer she had given was perhaps not the one that Agnes had wanted. She’s not sure that at the time she could have given a different one. She’s even less sure that it would have mattered if she had, and she’s not fanciful or morbid enough to dwell overlong on whether a different response to Agnes’ question might have changed anything.

It’s mostly pity that leads her to intercede on Jack’s behalf, but it’s something other than pity, too. He had given Agnes what Gertrude had never been able to. He had given her doubt.

**

Gerard is waiting for Gertrude in the car. The music is turned up too loud, and her eardrums buzz painfully in response. His scars are healing poorly, undoubtedly because he can’t quite stop himself from scratching at them. Even now he’s rubbing idly at the raised, flaking skin above his elbow, where the pristine outline of an eye is staring back at Gertrude accusingly, the only patch of flesh she can see below the neck unmarred by his encounter with Diego Molina.

“Sorry,” he says, and hastily he turns the volume down until it can barely be heard over the thrum of the engine. He slants a glance at her as she settles into the seat beside him. She thinks that he might be waiting for her approval.

He reminds her so much of Eric, sometimes. Not Eric as she had last seen him, that haunted and haunting creature who had told her secrets and not quite looked at her out of the shadowed hollows where his eyes had once been, but the Eric she had first known, bright and brazen and barely more than a boy. He reminds her of Eric, except she likes him better than she ever had Eric. That won’t prevent her from doing what needs to be done, but it does make her somewhat regret needing to do it.

She had regretted Michael, too, and Jan. Regret has never actually been a significant impediment for Gertrude.

“It’s fine,” Gertrude says. She reaches out and twists the dial until she can hear the throb of his so-called music echoing within her skull. “Leave it on.”

**

The scent of kerosene is sharp in Gertrude’s nose.

“I wasn’t actually planning on dying,” she says.

Elias Bouchard’s eyes are the same ones that had stared at her from the face of James Wright, and Richard Mendelson before him.

“It was a good plan, actually. If you hadn’t been so complacent about me keeping an eye out down here, it probably would have worked.”

“It still might.” She has the lighter clenched in her hand. The striker catches against her thumb and drags across the flint but doesn’t ignite. “Just needs a little spark, and—.”

Getting shot hurts, but not as much as she had thought it might. She tries to draw breath and can’t. There’s a wet heat spreading through her chest. She’s bleeding either out or in, and it doesn’t really matter which. The end result will be the same.

“Pity,” Elias says from somewhere above her, and in that moment she _hates_ him. _Fifty years_ , he had said, and she wonders if he knows how little he’s done to recommend himself to her in that time. Fifty years bound to this place, making pointless sacrifices and fighting an equally futile war, and it had all started because he had asked her to be his Archivist and had never bothered to tell her what that would mean. Everything she has done she has _done_ , but she doesn’t think that Jonah Magnus is entirely without blame, squatting in his Institute like a fat spider at the center of a web with his clean hands that don’t belong to him and his unchanging eyes. In that moment, she doesn’t just want him to burn, she wants him to hurt. She wants to see him _destroyed._

The scent of kerosene is sharp in Gertrude’s nose. All she needs is a little spark.

She’s spent years with the Desolation’s heat licking at her veins and crackling in her lungs. She expected it to fade once Agnes was gone. It never has.

Gertrude smiles, brief and grim and satisfied and perhaps not entirely without regret, and then Gertrude burns.

**

“Any idea what happened here?”

Jon has been standing at the edge of the police line for the better part of half an hour, and it’s hard not to twitch when someone addresses him suddenly from behind. “Someone burned the whole place down in the night,” he says, voice flat. “They just got the fire out.” He’s not sure how he feels. He’d not _loved_ his job in research, but he’d been good at it, and there had been a certain satisfaction to that. There’s a strangeness to watching the steam rise as the firefighters continue to douse the building where he’s spent his days – and occasionally his nights – for the last several years.

“Oh.” Jon finally turns his head and is a little relieved to see the same shock he’s feeling reflected on the face of the person standing next to him. The face is passing familiar, but Jon struggles to find a name to match it. Works in research. One of Tim’s friends, Jon thinks. They’d gone out for ice cream once, a nice little group of them that Jon had tried very hard not to be a part of. Jon still doesn’t know what the occasion had been. All excellent, useful information that should undoubtedly add up to a remembered _name_.

Martin. That’s it. _Martin_. Jon feels inordinately pleased with himself, until he takes another look at Martin’s face and is drawn forcibly back into the moment.

“That’s—.” Martin can’t seem to think of a way to finish the sentence.

“Yes,” he agrees.

“Was anyone in there?”Martin asks.

It’s such an obvious question that Jon feels a little guilty for not asking it sooner, himself. “I don’t know. I—we should—the only number I have is Sasha’s.” He doesn’t even know how to reach Diana, and she’s always been very kind about allowing him to stay in the Institute’s library long after she would rather it be closed.

“I’m sure someone has it handled.” Martin seems steadier now that Jon is off balance, and that should be annoying, but right in this moment he mostly finds it reassuring. “No reason we can’t start checking in, though. I can call Tim, and trust me, Tim has _everyone’s_ phone number.”

“Does he?”

“Mmm. Even if no one knows any more than we do, maybe we can arrange for some kind of get-together.” Martin glances at the burned out husk of the Magnus Institute. “I’m guessing that we’re all going to need to update our CVs, after this.” His face does something a little funny when he says it, something that Jon can’t quite decipher, but he thinks he likes the _way_ Martin says it: quick and rueful, a bit of gallows humor that he _knows_ he shouldn’t be indulging in before they’ve had confirmation that their jobs are today’s only casualty.

It’s a sensible plan, in any case. “All right.” He follows Martin’s gaze. “Maybe—maybe not here, though.” He has the strangest sensation, all of a sudden. As though he’s being watched.

“Oh! Oh, yes, right, of course. There’s a coffee place up the road. Did you want to—?”

Martin’s face is broad and friendly and faintly worried.

“Yes,” Jon says. “Yes, let’s.”

He takes one last look at the Magnus Institute, and then he turns his back on it. The feeling that he’s being watched fades, and Jon follows Martin, down the street and away. This morning has been unsettling, to say the least, but there are worse things than one’s place of employment burning down.

It’s not the end of the world, after all.

> “Those days I was willing, but frightened.  
> What I mean is, I wanted to live my life  
> but I didn’t want to do what I had to do  
> to go on, which was: to go back.  
> All winter the fires kept burning.”
> 
> \- Mary Oliver, _The Fire_

**Author's Note:**

> Art by Stan. Find her on tumblr [@snakewife](https://snakewife.tumblr.com/) or check out her webcomic, [The Hazards of Love](http://thehazardsoflove.com/).
> 
> I'm also on tumblr [@things-with-teeth](https://things-with-teeth.tumblr.com/). Come say hi.


End file.
